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About This Game

There are dark places in the world inhabited by evil denizens. Places filled with danger and foreboding where no ordinary man would dare to journey. However, there are a few who are willing to risk death in the name of good, in the name of justice, in the name of.. valuable loot!

Hack, Slash, Loot is a single-player turn-based dungeon crawler. Take control of a lone hero and explore sprawling dungeons, fight dangerous monsters, and most importantly, plunder valuable treasures. With a new dungeon created every game you can be sure that no two playthroughs will ever be the same. Boasting easy to master controls you'll be adventuring in no time, but there is still enough depth to challenge the most hardened of adventurers.

Buy a couple of dice. It will be cheaper and WAY more fun than this game.And the chances of getting a desired number on said dice are accurate, as oppossed to this game's RNG.

RNG (random number generator) is an important part in roguelikes. It's not, however, the ONLY meaningful part.This is the game's worst sin. it's completely random. In good roguelikes, there's a lot of strategy and thought. Randomness can screw you up, but usually, a good player can turn the tides.Not in hack, slash, loot. Frankly it's like someone saw the success of rogue-lites and jumped the wagon without actual knowledge of what makes a roguelike/lite a good game.

Protip: it's NOT randomness what makes a roguelike good. Randomness is just one of the ingredients.

This game is stupid-hard, and not even in a good way. There's no depth to the mechanics; it's just one RNG-driven slap-fight after another. Every once in a while I play it again just to remind myself why I never play it.

If you want something that's really hard but rewarding, go play Monster Hunter, Dark Souls, or something by Edmund McMillen.

If you want to have an idea of how random this game is, then press ctrl + f (cmd + f on a Mac) and type "random".

I love many "random" games, but like it has been pinpointed in other reviews, in such games you're essentially learning from your mistakes and experience, one's own self "out of character xp level" experience that adds to your skills and perception by grasping the mechanics of the game. In such games, you're rewarded progressively by the experience you have gathered in earlier play-throughs and in every new game you're becoming better, not because you're upgrading a character from the game (Rogue Legacy I am looking at you!) but because you're comprehending better how the game is actually working. That leads to the conclusion that the deeper the mechanics of a game, the more rewarding the feeling of satisfaction you're getting from it.

Unfortunately, 'Hack, Slash, Loot' is not such a game, in all of the above statements.

Hack, Slash, Loot, or "HSL", looks charming at first with it's retro-style pixel art... until you realize that the gameplay is even more primitive. It is not an understatement to say that everything in this game either comes down to little more than random chance and comparing numbers.

Combat is completely limited to clicking on an enemy until they die. That's it. No special moves, no abilities, no changing gear, nothing. Sure, depending on your weapon you either use melee, ranged or magic attacks, but unless you're fighting near a weapon drop you can't change on the fly, plus your character will usually specialize in one type so there' very little reason to change unless you get VERY skewed consumable drops (more on that later). At best you can try to bottleneck enemies in doorways or tight coriidors to fight them one by one, or run away and hope you find something useful before you get surrounded, but that barely qualifies as "strategy". And even then, you still have to hope that RNGesus is smiling down upon you.

The item system is almost as primitive. Most of the time, it feels less like you are trying to decide which weapon or piece of armor to equip, and more like you're just comparing numbers (although special damage types such as the stunning Lighting do make things a little more interesting) As for consumables, you never know if a potion or w/e will help and/or hinder you, meaning once again it's entirely up to luck rather than any sort of choice or strategy if it help you.

Oh, and there's no save system. At all.

All in all, this game had a lot of potential, but instead the gameplay is comparable to banging your head against a wall while comparing helmets and popping pills that "might" make it hurt less. What this game needed was something, ANYTHING that might have made the gameplay more complex than dice rolling: Abilities/items to use in a pinch, swapping around weapons, etc etc: anything that would make success less dependant on how lucky you are.

If you're at all thinking of picking up this title anyway, I highly recommend buying another game called One-Way Heroics instead, which in a nutshell is practically like this game with the improvements I just suggested, and at only somewhat more than half the price.